At Once Undermannered And Overparented
At Once Undermannered And Overparented
That describes far too many kids today, and it isn't their fault, but that of the adults who are supposed to be teaching them both independence and how to be a civilized part of a world with a lot of other people in it.
My pal Lenore Skenazy -- called "the worst mother in the world" for letting her then-9-year-old son Izzy ride the subway home by himself after he begged to do so -- has company. I think I was the most hated women in Los Angeles this week for my op-ed on screaming children on planes and the people who "parent" them.
Not everybody hated me for it -- some people were grateful. And I made the #1 most-emailed story of the day not only in Los Angeles, but in Australian papers, too! The piece ran in Dallas, Philly, Atlantic City, and elsewhere, and was linked today by Denis Dutton on Arts & Letters Daily. If you want to take advantage of free shipping at Amazon (on orders of $25 or more), I suggest picking up all three of our books.
Denis' excellent book is The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
But back to today's topic -- an article by Nancy Gibbs in TIME on helicopter parenting and the damage it seems to do to kids. Here's the bit where she quotes Lenore:
Once obsessing about kids' safety and success became the norm, a kind of orthodoxy took hold, and heaven help the heretics -- the ones who were brave enough to let their kids venture outside without Secret Service protection. Just ask Lenore Skenazy, who to this day, when you Google "America's Worst Mom," fills the first few pages of results -- all because one day last year she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. A newspaper column she wrote about it somehow ignited a global firestorm over what constitutes reasonable risk. She had reporters calling from China, Israel, Australia, Malta. ("Malta! An island!" she marvels. "Who's stalking the kids there? Pirates?") Skenazy decided to fight back, arguing that we have lost our ability to assess risk. By worrying about the wrong things, we do actual damage to our children, raising them to be anxious and unadventurous or, as she puts it, "hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguishers."Skenazy, a Yale-educated mom who with her husband is raising two boys in New York City, had ingested all the same messages as the rest of us. Her sons' school once held a pre-field-trip assembly explaining exactly how close to a hospital the children would be at all times. She confesses to being "at least part Sikorsky," hiring a football coach for a son's birthday and handing out mouth guards as party favors. But when the Today show had her on the air to discuss her subway decision, interviewer Ann Curry turned to the camera and asked, "Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?" (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)
From that day and the food fight that followed, she launched her Free Range Kids blog, which eventually turned into her own Dangerous Book for Parents: Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. There is no rational reason, she argues, that a generation of parents who grew up walking alone to school, riding mass transit, trick-or-treating, teeter-tottering and selling Girl Scout cookies door to door should be forbidding their kids to do the same. But somehow, she says, "10 is the new 2. We're infantilizing our kids into incompetence." She celebrates seat belts and car seats and bike helmets and all the rational advances in child safety. It's the irrational responses that make her crazy, like when Dear Abby endorses the idea, as she did in August, that each morning before their kids leave the house, parents take a picture of them. That way, if they are kidnapped, the police will have a fresh photo showing what clothes they were wearing. Once the kids make it home safe and sound, you can delete the picture and take a new one the next morning.
That advice may seem perfectly sensible to parents bombarded by heartbreaking news stories about missing little girls and the predator next door. But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with "How can you let him go to the store alone?," she suggests countering with "How can you let him visit your relatives?" (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) "I'm not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn't be prepared," she says. "But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources." Besides, she says with a smile, "a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It's nowhere you'd want to be."
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Stumble It!
In defense of parents who overparent and underdiscipline, they are, unfortunately, listening way too much to a mainstream media that says over and over that children are fragile little flowers who will be destroyed if parents ever say no. So, first, three cheers for swimming against the tide. I say, if you see a parent give a misbehaving kid a butt swat, go up to him or her and say "Thank you. Not enough parents discipline their children these days and I'm glad to see you are being a good parent". They need to hear it. We really need to act individually to change this social consensus .
At the same time we need to talk about what is reasonable risk. If you want to know really why so many children are obese, go look at any elementary, middle or high school ten minutes before school starts. There is a traffic jam of parents who won't let their children ride the school bus or walk to school (which I, like the author, started doing when I was about 7). It seems to me that the technology we have today can substantially reduce the worry without turning the child into a prisoner of his parents paranoia. If you are really, really worried, put a GPS locator in his backpack. The number of child kidnappings is no higher than it ever was, we just hear about them more. I would be much more worried about traffic accidents than kidnapping, if I had a school age child these days.
As the population here in the US continues to age and the rate of singles, never marrieds and childless by choice continues to grow (especially amongst the white population) we are quickly becoming a society where children are valued less and less as well as seen as a hindrance. If it keeps up a whole new generation of children will eventually come to pass who will choose to opt out on paying the SS benefits you and I will be receiving in a few years and I for one won't blame them one single bit.
That is end result of the war on children you seem to be promoting…
An adult alone on a subway is a target ripe for the picking for pimps, gangs and other unsavory individuals (especially in loony bin cities like LA and NYC) that I could never ever consider putting a child of mine at that kind of risk in this day and age.
Just recently my wife's nephews 5 yr old daughter was dropped off at the wrong house by a substitute bus driver and fortunately wasn't killed along the highway she was walking to get home but was instead picked up by a county sheriff deputy.
When I lived in Davenport Iowa many years ago I often walked to school on sidewalks while here in Georgia in the Mableton area where I used to live there were none. So I wasn't about to let my son walk on the side of an extremely busy roadway that had 5 lanes, especially, after one of his elementary classmates was hit and killed on that same road because his parents thought that it was ok to do so.